Peggy Heinkel-Wolfe said she very nearly put her first book in a drawer and forgot about it.

She found that chronicling her life with her firstborn son, Sam, might be too hard. Sam, now a high school graduate who is taking college courses, has autism. Autism is a complex developmental disability, and those who have it are affected in vastly different ways.

DRC file photo/Gary Payne

Sam Wolfe, now 20, and his mother Peggy Heinkel-Wolfe pose at their home in July 2005 in Arygle. Heinkel-Wolfe was awarded a book contract from the University of North Texas Press at the 2005 Mayborn Nonfiction Writers' Conference. The book, which was released this month, is about the first four years of raising Sam before he ws diagnosed with autism.

But it wasn’t the autism that gave the reporter and author such trouble. The hard part was telling the story of autism’s jarring aftershocks, the way it can bump a marriage off its axis and make parents question their most basic skills and smarts when it comes to raising a child.

See Sam Run: A Mother’s Story of Autism was published by the University of North Texas Press this month. Heinkel-Wolfe covers special projects as well as city and town governments of communities surrounding Denton for the  Denton Record Chronicle. She attended the 2005 Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Writers Conference of the Southwest, and submitted her manuscript of the book to a contest. She won the first prize, but the book stalled in UNT Press reviews.

“Part of the reason I submitted the book to the manuscript contest was to workshop it. I’d hit a wall,” Heinkel-Wolfe said. “One of my journalism mentors was one of the first people to read it, and didn’t like the chronology. They said it was confusing. That kept happening with people who read it. The chronology was confusing. I think maybe there were too many flashbacks. I asked myself: ‘How lost can the reader be with me before I lose them?’”

An editorial board with the UNT press recommended that the university publish the book after the writer smoothed out some of the problems.

“I knew that working out the problems meant me putting it in a drawer and forgetting about it,” Heinkel-Wolfe said.

When writer Craig Hanley, another Mayborn manuscript contest winner, published his book, William & Rosalie: A Holocaust Testimony, Heinkel-Wolfe said she made a decision.

“When Craig’s book came out, and people started coming up to me and asking me what was happening with my book, that was the first time I was able to say that I thought the book was dead,” she said.

She even asked the UNT Press to release her from the project.

That’s when Heinkel-Wolfe started working with George Getschow, the writer-in-residence with the UNT Mayborn Graduate School of Journalism.

“George Getschow talked to me a lot about the first chapter,” Heinkel-Wolfe said. “He finally said: ‘The story isn’t about Sam and autism. The story is about you, and you need to stop resisting that.’”

And so Heinkel-Wolfe wrote a revealing, raw first chapter that races through her childhood – complete with classic family coping dilemmas, a severe bout with an eating disorder and her eventual attempted suicide — into her young adulthood, which is anchored by the writer’s successful first career as a concert euphonium player. The chapter ends with Heinkel-Wolfe finding out that her pregnancy test was positive, and telling her mother the news.

See Sam Run turns off the soft-focus lens so often aimed at parenthood in general, and specifically at motherhood. When Sam comes into the world, he’s a difficult baby who exhausts his mother’s resources, her patience and, often, her belief in herself.  

The book is mostly about a mother learning to cope with a child with special needs, a life that often feels naked and untenable. As a child, Sam often seemed keenly focused on objects or activities, and didn’t wish to be with other children and people. It took the Wolfe family hard years to teach their eldest son to do things that seem basic to most parents: teaching him to speak, coaching him to become more social. But the book is also a precise resource for parents with autistic children. One of the most charming parts of the book is the “Senior Scrapbook,” written by Sam himself.

Heinkel-Wolfe said she struggled with some of the book’s raw honesty, but got nothing but support from her family. She portrays her family in a warts-and-all light, but “I didn’t get off easy, either,” she said. She said there was a crucial moment when her late husband, musician Mark Wolfe, said: “Throw me under the bus.”

“The George-inspired re-write was brutal,” she said. “I ended up re-typing the book from the manuscript. There are times when I write where it feels like my fingers just start going. I’ve learned that if my fingers just start going, I let it be. There were parts of the process where I definitely went off in a different direction for 12 pages.”

Mark Wolfe was killed when a vehicle struck him as he rode his motorcycle to pick up groceries just before Christmas last year. Heinkel-Wolfe dedicated the book to Mark. The surviving family, including son, Michael, and daughter, Paige, has celebrated the book’s publication with one of the key players of the real life story missing. Michael and Paige attend Argyle High School.

Living through Sam’s childhood was a different sort of challenge than writing it, Heinkel-Wolfe said. Toughness becomes a necessity. Children with disabilities have to do the hard work of growing up, often with added pressure of specialists, teachers who aren’t trained to teach children with special needs and, at times, people who decide that a parent needs their unsolicited advice.

“When you are the parent of a child with a disability, you just don’t get embarrassed anymore,” she said. “You have so many people coming into your life, people scrutinize you, people ask you all these personal questions and a lot of times, people are judging you. Sometimes, you are just this child’s stupid parent. You just get to a point where you don’t get embarrassed anymore.”

She speaks highly of Argyle schools, and gives some credit to herself and Mark for learning how to spot people that wouldn’t help them or bring the best out in their son.

“Argyle has been good. A lot of teachers with soft and squishy hearts who are smart, who are good teachers,” she said.

Heinkel-Wolfe said the family is excited about the book coming out. Micahel and Paige are still learning to live in a family “like this,” Heinkel-Wolfe said. Sam seemed skeptical about the book.

“At first, he was keeping it at arm’s length, but I think he’s excited about it,” she said. 

The author and her son will be at a reading and book signing this week.

It was hard to get to this point, but Heinkel-Wolfe says it seems like the book was meant to be. The book was accepted to the first literary journal to which she submitted it. Then it won the manuscript prize.

“When I was part of those early [online] communities about autism, people were responding to these paragraphs I was writing. Even then, it was like this was a story that needed to be out there.”

BOOK SIGNING

What: Author Peggy Heinkel-Wolfe gives a reading and signs copies of See Sam Run ($22.95, UNT Press)

When: 7 to 9 p.m. Wednesday

Where: Argyle High School, 1915 U.S. Highway 377

LUCINDA BREEDING can be reached at 940-566-6877. Her e-mail address is cbreeding@dentonrc.com.